Soviet Poster Collection - Swarthmore College Peace Collection

Soviet Poster Collection - Swarthmore College Peace Collection. "... Frank W. Fetter (Swarthmore College Class of 1920) acquired a series of posters during his visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1932 Ellen Starr Brinton, the first Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, led a study group of members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to the Soviet Union. In Moscow authorities permitted her to select a number of posters from a repository. E. Raymond Wilson, Quaker activist and Washington lobbyist, also visited the Soviet Union in this period and later donated the posters he had gathered during his trip.
These one hundred rare propaganda posters fall into two main categories. Approximately half cover child and maternal health, and offer a rare glimpse into the efforts of the early Soviet regime to promote the proper care of infants and toddlers. The remaining posters date from the period of the first five-year plan (1928-1932) and focus not only on the goals and accomplishments of collectivization and industrialization, but also on the class enemies of the Soviet Union, namely the Russian Orthodox church and the clergy, kulaks, capitalists, and foreign powers seeking to sabotage the communist effort to build socialism."